Former vice-president Dick Cheney celebrated the Ides of March with CNN's John King in his first interview since leaving office. He used the opportunity to proclaim the country less safe, and to air publicly grievances between himself and former President George Bush.

Et tu, Cheney?

Cheney took the unusual step of entertaining a question that suggested he had shouted at the president in an argument about whether to pardon Scooter Libby. "I was clearly not happy that we in effect left Scooter hanging in the wind," said Cheney, "which I don't think was appropriate." Though it had been widely reported that Cheney had sought a full pardon for his former chief of staff, his willingness to publicly engage the president was further evidence of the widening chasm between the two in the final years of the administration.

Cheney did defend Bush administration's record on torture, enemy combatants, military commissions and CIA black sites, arguing that such policies were critical for intelligence gathering purposes. He criticised the Obama administration for viewing the threat from global terrorism as a law-enforcement issue rather than a war. But what Cheney failed to admit is that, as he well knows, these controversial policies arose specifically because terrorism does not fit neatly into either a war or a law-enforcement frame.

A war would have prisoners of war, uniformed officers required by the Geneva Convention to provide only a name, rank and serial number upon capture. Of course, on the current battlefields, there are no uniforms or serial numbers, no clear way of identifying enemies and no easy solution to long-term imprisonment. Were it as simple as war versus law enforcement, the Bush administration would not have been inclined to create a new category – enemy combatant – a definition the Obama administration has decided to scrap.

Though he appeared to have shed some pounds and perhaps some stress in his post-vice presidency, Cheney has not shed the bitter demeanour and unpleasantness that has come to define his character. He seemed entirely uninterested in conveying the statesman quality that former executives are often eager to exude, instead explicitly accusing the current president of putting the country in danger. "He is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack," said Cheney referring to Obama's reversal of a number of Bush administration policies.

Cheney also attempted to absolve the Bush administration of responsibility for the state of the economy, describing the recession as a global economic crisis without admitting the United States' critical role in the global economy or discussing the dramatic regulatory failures of the Bush administration. When talking about Iraq, Cheney seemed to glow with excitement, unwilling to say mission accomplished only for fear of backlash.

But though some missions have indeed been accomplished in Iraq, our initial objective, our entire justification for the war, will never be achieved. On that, the former vice-president was characteristically silent.

Ultimately we learned only a few new things about one of the least popular figures in the country: Cheney's drives himself, in a car that talks to him. He has a Blackberry. He sleeps in. And in his post-presidency, he is the same embittered defender of Bush's failed administration that he was before leaving office.